Will, I saw your reverse engineering project on, http://www.internet-search-engines-faq.com/reverse-engineering.shtml Looks like a great idea, I was wondering if you have any results or findings so far?
Anyone who is interested in the anatomy of a search engine may also want to take a look at this. It's an abridged version of the white-paper that Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page wrote to present the concept of Google: PDF version: http://www.public.asu.edu/~ychen127/cse591f05/anatomy.pdf HTML version: http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html Sorry if this has been presented before. It gave me a better understanding of SE mechanics. While subsequent updates may have reduced (or nullified) certain ranking processes within Google it's still a good read.